Call it Downton Abbey syndrome: The newest trend among the world' s ultra-rich—like, royalty-grade, private-plane-owning Scrooge McDuck rich—is to have a butler. But what type of person would willingly give over his life to serving the outrageously moneyed? As David Katz discovers, these are men and women with boundless grace, innate propriety, and the wherewithal to quickly hide six hookers on a mega-yacht

It’s the first morning of butler school in London, and I’m flanked by eleven classmates who paid $2,700 for the privilege of learning to be servants. We’ve convened in a conference room at the London headquarters of Bespoke Bureau, the elite staffing agency that runs the school. Compared with the royal grandeur just outside—a medieval stone courtyard where the lord mayor’s coronation carriage is on display—the office space itself is more Dunder Mifflin bland, perhaps a first taste of the upstairs-downstairs dynamic to come. We’re soon joined by instructor Steve Ford, 47, a sturdily built Welsh butler charged with teaching us formal table service, etiquette, and household management.

Ford gives each of us a good once-over, making sure we look the butler part: neat hair, clipped nails, no visible tattoos or jewelry other than wedding rings, even on the women. (Genderwise, our class is split fifty-fifty.) He checks our shoes, which, he says, should be "polished, enough that you can shave in them, but never outshine your boss’s." Then he passes out our uniforms for the week—black ties and white shirts over black trousers—and orders us each to take a turn at an ironing board set up in the center of the room, introducing ourselves as we press the wrinkles from our duds. (Or in my case, replace them with fresher wrinkles.)

My fellow trainees range in age from 25 to 49 and include a stewardess on the yacht of an American cosmetics billionaire, a Singaporean hotel manager, and a British-army sniper formerly stationed in Afghanistan who once worked as the concierge at a five-star hotel. All have previous experience in the high-end-service sector. Meanwhile I can’t tell you if the dinner fork goes to the left or the right of the soufflé fork. Or do you eat soufflé with a spoon?

Lucky for me, my livelihood won’t depend on knowing the answer (spoon). I’m here doing research, part of a larger mission to learn the truths of being a butler, a vocation that’s booming. For that, you can thank our New Gilded Age, with a wealth gap that’s become a yawning chasm. There are currently more millionaires worldwide than ever—the total jumped by 10 percent in 2012 alone—which means a huge demand for those who serve the super-rich, like the butler. The Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern oil barons, and Asian moguls buying up expensive real estate in and around London are also exporting the Euro-aristocratic lifestyle back home. Thirty-five years ago, there were only a few hundred butlers left in Britain; today there are roughly 10,000, plus thousands more abroad, including the fastest-growing butler market of them all, China. "For the Chinese, it’s a status thing," says Sara Vestin Rahmini, who founded Bespoke Bureau. "They’re like, ’Just send us somebody who looks British, who looks European.’ "

China now has over 1 million millionaires, with 90,000 minted just in 2012. Gary Williams, a London-based staffing agent who himself was a butler for fifteen years, credits much of China’ s butler demand to Downton Abbey. Watched by millions of Chinese, it’s one of the biggest British TV imports ever. The show is more than just a soapy diversion, he says; it’s a guidebook for living in a stratified society. "The Chinese aren’t even really sure what a British butler should do," says Williams. "It will take them ten to fifteen years to really understand that."

But they’ll pay—and pay well—to find out. A new butler willing to go east, to Shanghai or Dubai or anywhere else suffering an Anglo-servant shortage, can start at $60,000 a year and run his employer’s estate from the start. In the West, where standards are higher and the competition more fierce, a rookie typically apprentices for a few years and earns a starting salary of maybe $40,000. A butler in either market should hit six figures within five to six years—sooner if he learns a few dirty secrets or gets poached by one of his boss’s billionaire friends.

So the money is respectable and the demand is high. Yet buttling—which is the very ludicrous, very real verb for what butlers do—obviously isn’t a career that one takes on lightly. I couldn’t help but wonder: Who wants to become a butler? There are easier ways to make a living that don’t entail all-consuming servitude. So I tracked down butlers from Shanghai to Los Angeles, and even enrolled in butler school, in an effort to peek behind the velvet curtain.

What I saw was the intense, sometimes thankless existence I suspected. A butler supervises his boss’s household staff, oversees his meals and entertainment, and attends to his every whim and desire. He must be equal parts concierge and Michael Clayton-esque fir. In that sense, the basic job requirements haven’t changed much in a hundred years. What has changed: the boss. Forget about the dainty lord ringing for his cup of tea. The butlers of today serve paranoid money managers, manor-owning supermodels, Chinese celebrities, and horny sheiks. And they all have stories—horrible, hilarious, sometimes hooker-fueled stories—that they never get to tell, because nobody talks to the butler. Until now.

Ford has worked as a private butler for twenty years. He’ s served English nobility and Russian tycoons, but one of his recent gigs was for Claudia Schiffer and her British husband, Matthew Vaughn (director of Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class), managing their 350-acre, seven-bedroom country estate in Suffolk, England. Ford supervised the staff of fourteen and looked after a supermodel’s wardrobe. But the household, with its loose hierarchy, informal Hollywood vibe, and couture strewn around, proved too chaotic for his taste. So he quit. "I have certain standards, and I won’t come down from them," he says. "I’d rather move on." He’s been teaching at Bespoke for four years.

Ford’s lessons cover practical matters like getting red-wine stains out of a decanter (use denture cleaner) and proper placement of the salad fork (nodded off during that one). But the bedrock of his instruction is deportment, especially the stuff a butler doesn’ t do. It’ s not a short list. A butler never offers his hand to be shaken. He never sits down in front of his boss. He never says "You’re welcome" to a guest. "If you have to say anything at all,’" Ford tells us, "say ’My pleasure, ’because "You’ re welcome" is very hotel." And if something is "very hotel" or "very restaurant," it’s too lax for a butler. If a butler screws up, apologies should be succinct—or not made at all. Once, when Ford served at a royal banquet, a VIP female guest abruptly turned into him, forcing his hand down her blouse. He said nothing: "Who do you think would be more embarrassed if I did?"

Ford spent nine years in the British army, where he first learned the trade. He says exmilitary are drawn to the profession, and he’s seen a recent influx as Britain has drawn down its deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq: "They’re lost, as I was. They can’t cope with civilian life. As a butler, they get security and a place to live, and the discipline is there." Ex-soldiers make the best butlers, he says, because they come programmed to take orders and can tolerate abuse. Plus, they know how to keep a secret.

Butlers see everything, but they’re expected to say nothing. Traditionally they have been bound by a code of discretion, but that’s changing now, too. These days, they’re just as often bound by a thick nondisclosure agreement (which Ford says Schiffer never asked him to sign). To be safe, Ford advises our class to delete all our social-media accounts, just to minimize temptation and late-night slipups. A few students groan.

Ford says the harder part is holding your tongue around your boss. Especially when he’s wrong. Especially when you’re only trying to help. Butlers don’t wryly dispense nuggets of fatherly wisdom the way wise old Alfred chastises young Master Wayne, not if they want to keep their jobs. The gig is about fulfilling every whim of your employer, no questions asked, no excuses given.

"Imagine you’re giving a VIP dinner party for a client," Ford says to the class. "It’s 9 p.m. and you get a call: Your child is sick and he’s gone to the hospital. What do you do?"

Maybe it’s because I’m expecting my first kid, but the answer seems obvious, to me and to the other students. Explain the situation to your boss, get someone on staff to cover, then hightail it to the hospital.

"No," says Ford. "You stay put. Your boss should never know your problems. The medical staff can handle the situation. If your answer was ’I would leave,’ this life’s not for you."

Nothing impacts a butler’s life like finding the right boss. For some, like Daniel Bentley, 44, that search can take decades. An English country boy trained at a hotel-management school, Bentley is a lifelong butler, though with his close-cropped beard and wire-rimmed glasses, he looks more like a soft-spoken literature professor.

Bentley has managed to build a life around his career, including raising his teenage daughter with his American ex-wife. He met her while he was working for a Mexican media mogul, but the marriage didn’t last. "Most butlers are either gay or divorced," he says, because the hours and travel can be toxic to traditional marriage. Still, the relationship brought him to L.A., where he now runs the 36,000-square-foot Bel Air home of an American financier. In the U.S., green-card requirements make British-born butlers a rare commodity. "My boss jokes that he pays a lot of money for this accent," says Bentley. He appreciates his current boss—or principal, in butler-speak—but hasn’t always been so lucky.

One of his first jobs was a two-year stint as the chief steward aboard the yacht of a sheik—basically, a butler at sea. The sheik wasn’t on his boat all that often, but when he did set sail, he liked to take the vessel "whoring," as Bentley puts it. "The girls would all line up on the dock. The sheik would say, ’You go. You go. You come aboard.’" On one four-day trip from Spain to Morocco, one of the sheik’s wives surprised the crew in port. "She came on board with her daughters, looking in every bed, trying to find a pubic hair." Luckily, Bentley had been given a heads-up. He had his maids strip the sheets. Meanwhile Bentley hid six prostitutes in his own cabin, knowing that a sheik’s wife would never go into the staff’s lower-deck quarters. Then he stayed up all night in the laundry room, scrubbing evidence. Finally, exhausted, he went to his cabin for his first real sleep after the sheik’s four-day bender.

The moment he closed his eyes, a subordinate knocked on his door: The sheik needed him on deck immediately. "Can’t you take care of it?" Bentley pleaded. No, the boss demanded Bentley. So he pulled himself out of bed, threw on his uniform, and raced up to see his employer. The urgent matter? The sheik needed him to turn off a light. "That one, there," he said, pointing to a switch three feet away. "That’s when you have to be thick-skinned," says Bentley, who flipped the switch without a sigh.

You’d think the sheik would be an easy lock for Bentley’s worst boss, but the competition is stiff. There is the American building magnate who split open Bentley’s head with a well-hurled Herm&#xE8;s shoebox. And the Italian businessman who sent him to London to get fitted for a new uniform, which turned out to be a bulletproof vest. Bentley kept his cool around all of these lunatics. It’s not that he doesn’t get frustrated, he says, but even in the heat of battle, he can weigh the gratification of retaliation—say, bludgeoning the sheik on the yacht with the solid-gold candlestick holder—against the value of his career. He gets to live on a beautiful estate, travel the world, and "spend someone else’s money on the best of everything." There are perks.

But every butler has his limit for the amount of abuse he’ll tolerate, and these days, that threshold may be lower than ever. The butler boom means a person with Bentley’s experience doesn’t have much trouble finding a better principal. Soon after the sheik’s seafaring orgy, Bentley walked. He had another job within two weeks.

Pop Quiz: You’re a butler for a sheik having a yacht orgy, and his wife shows up. What do you do?

We students spend one full day of butler school practicing dinner service by waiting on one another, role-playing-style. I’m a natural at impersonating a demanding, half-drunk guest, but I suck at formal service. I’m wobbly and sloppy with the tray, and that’s before Ford starts placing obstacles in my path, like a big bucket that stands in for the family hound. Tongs are considered déclassé, so we serve using a large spoon and fork held between the fingers of one hand. I can never get a good grip on the food, and when I finally do, I slingshot a cherry tomato across the table. I start to sweat, too, and not just from nerves. Despite the butler’ s genteel rep, balancing hot ten-pound platters is hard physical labor. (Ford recommends a change of uniform two or three times a day.) On the plus side, my incompetence brings up some valuable teaching moments for the rest of the class: How does one properly notify Sir that one has dropped arugula in his hair? And what does one do after one clocks Madame in the face with one’s tray?

All the students are more graceful servers than I, particularly Davis Govender (not his real name), a handsome 49-year-old white South African. He maintains perfect posture even when kneeling with a heavy tray, and he nails the butler smile: warm, welcoming, and completely inscrutable. To be fair, Govender has had some practice. He’ s the only student who has already worked as a butler in private homes. Some recent servant trauma sapped his self-assurance, and he enrolled to get his nerve back.

Having spent much of his working life in the wedding-planning industry, Govender moved to London eight years ago to become a butler, initially for an old-money husband and wife. He would serve them three-course dinners as they were driven around in their Land Rover—crystal glassware, silver utensils, the whole bit—all delivered by Govender from the front seat. He’d happily still be pouring champagne roadies if the hours weren’t so brutal (fourteen hours a day, six days a week). Instead he took a higher-paying job with a young British financier and his wife, who used Govender in her quest to become a famous actress. She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring film crews to re-create scenes from Hollywood movies—only this time starring her. To shoot one scene, she booked a mansion in Kent and a crew of forty for a full week. Meanwhile, she hid all of this from her husband—and made Govender do the same. The grunt work and secrecy eventually wore him out. "I wasn’t doing dinner parties, because they never entertained. I was just earning a salary. I wasn’t a proud butler," he says. "I believe I am the ultimate servant, and I just want to get paid for that."

Ideally that would mean not working for a nouveau riche couple. Govender says that they often have no clue how to interact with household staff. Govender’s been in situations where the wife would cry on his shoulder one minute, then treat him like the help the next. New-money families often make the mistake of palling around with the butler, then reverting to master and servant when their real friends arrive. Govender hopes his next gig will be with one of the relatively rare old-money families who’ve had butlers for generations. The kind who don’t need their servants to teach them how to be aristocratic.

Gary Williams, the London-based staffing agent and instructor, just received a request from a developer in eastern China for 160 butlers, all for one massive new luxury community. The builder is dangling British butlers as sweeteners, the way an American developer might include a golf-club membership or a Sub-Zero-stocked kitchen. Williams, who runs the British Butler Institute (a competitor of Bespoke), says he doesn’ t have the manpower to meet that demand. He can maybe deliver twenty.

For a recruiter, this is a good problem to have, and Williams isn’ t joking when he thanks Downton Abbey for the assist. Sure, the reason for the show’ s popularity in China is, largely, the same as here: It’ s addictive and fun. But it also reflects a certain Chinese enthusiasm for how Westerners handle and display great wealth. You could even argue that Downton works as a tidy, albeit dated, guide to the type of class-obsessed society that Communist China spent decades resisting. The show depicts the type of have-it-all service that the modern upper crust of China is eager to re-create at home, which explains why Nick Bonell* is there.

Bonell, 52, moved to Shanghai from London last year and is the Platonic ideal of the British butler. He was born to parents who served on an English estate, and apprenticed to the head butler at age 8. He tells me that he even worked at Highclere Castle, the manor where Downton Abbey is filmed. And he ends every sentence with a polite "sir," even when talking to a journalist. Bonell strayed into high-end restaurant work when butler jobs were scarce in the ’ 80s and ’ 90s, but seeing the new boom, he took a course last summer at the British Butler Institute to burnish his résumé. Three months later, he went to China.

He works for two different principals, including one he calls the Oprah Winfrey of China. Both employers have given him a wide berth to transform their households. "What shocked me most when I arrived was the low level of service compared with the West,’" he says. "Even in the five-star hotels." Timing, style, and attitude are way below what he expects. Still, he’ s learned to reform cautiously. As much as Chinese principals might fetishize English service, they also have their own firm traditions, forcing Bonell to fashion a sort of hybrid buttling protocol. He recalls an early dinner party where he first encountered the Chinese practice of toasting fast and furiously around the table, each speech punctuated with "Gan bei!," which loosely translates to "Down it!" If a guest fails to chug what’ s in his glass, it’s an insult to the toaster. In school, a butler is taught to keep wineglasses full, which Bonell did. After a few rounds of gan bei-ing, he realized it was only a matter of minutes before the entire party—including his boss—would be under the table. Now he just refills with a splash of wine.

For Bonell, though, the biggest surprise has been the reverential way he’ s treated. When he’ s walking down the street or shopping in his uniform, locals snap his picture. After a recent dinner, his employer asked her guests to honor him with a round of applause. One restaurant owner took him around to every table, just to show off their friendship. Without the uniform, he’ s another Westerner in a city increasingly full of them. So Bonell wears his vest and tails even on days off, running errands or drinking at the bar. It’ s what takes him from a living status symbol to a butler who has status.

Chinese-born butlers don’ t enjoy nearly the same respect. By employing a white man, a Chinese principal sends a clear message: I possess the money, clout, and class to hire a Westerner and pay him a Western salary. A native butler costs less—roughly $300 a month, which is affordable for even middle-class Chinese—and so brings none of the showing-up-the-Joneses superiority.

Bonell sees the psychological effects of this double standard firsthand. In addition to his private work, he trains Chinese on behalf of the British Butler Institute; he’s currently teaching a regiment of local butlers at the Shanghai Yacht Club (owned by one of his principals). Bonell says the unrelenting bias against the homegrown staff affects the way his students see themselves. They’re insecure and self-doubting in a way that butlers, the vice presidents of their households, can’t be. "I try to explain to students that this is not a subservient role. That being a butler is not just hygiene, manners, uniform, deportment, or skill. That it requires a positive mind-set," says Bonell. "But there’s still a long way to go to convince them that this is a career to be proud of."

At the end of the weeklong butler class, Bespoke Bureau owner Sara Vestin Rahmini says she can tell which students are cut out for the butler’s life and who will struggle. She’s eager to place Govender, who’s got his groove back. She is less optimistic about my potential, and not just because of my shoddy spoon-and-fork skills. "You’d be okay in the discretion department, but I don’t think you have the patience," she tells me. "You would find it irritating waiting on other people and getting bossed around." She’ s not wrong. We spent our last few days of class learning household care in a lavish London town house. When I walked into the place—with its private elevator, servants’ quarters, and Marc Chagall hanging in the living room—my first thought wasn’t "I’d love to work for this person" but rather "I want to be this person."

For a butler, that kind of jealousy is a poison. Yet, surprisingly, it’s rare. Not one of the butlers I interviewed admitted to envying his boss or having the slightest desire to swap places. Govender puts it bluntly: "I’ve seen more unhappiness where I’ve worked than anywhere else. They’re suspicious. Worried. They don’t seem to have fun. It’s really quite sad."

I’ll admit to taking a certain perverse pleasure in hearing that the super-rich may get super-richer but not any happier. A butler can’t do the same, though; a person can’t serve someone and simultaneously root for his unhappiness (unless you’ re a waiter at a trendy restaurant in L.A.).

And while it’s easy to assume that anyone who willingly becomes a butler must harbor a notion of his own inferiority, none of the butlers I met were slavish doormats or even particularly humble. From Ford, who thought Claudia Schiffer’s lifestyle beneath him, to Govender, the self-described "ultimate servant," to Bonell, who’s bringing five-star service to the newly moneyed East, all have healthy egos buttressed by a belief that their way is the best possible way. A happy butler is a Buddhist monk in tails, taking pleasure in the duty itself. Serving, but never servile.

Besides, in our new kings-and-paupers economic reality, there are too many ultra-wealthy employers eager to poach him away. At this moment, a happy butler is harder to find than a needy billionaire. Which bestows the butler with something you’d never expect: power.

*Nick Bonnell died unexpectedly of natural causes as this story went to press.

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